Search Engine Marketing - The Art of Swallowing a Market

Gone are the days when you could simply build a website for a customer that contained content, explained their product and gave people a place to purchase.

While this contains all the basic building blocks for converting a visitor to a customer, it lacks all evidence of actual marketing. Without some basic search marketing know-how incorporated into the creation of your customer's web presence, there will be no market swallowed.

In the beginning, there was a product, adrift in a sea of like products. And a marketer looked down and said 'Lo, this product is good "because" ...' and a unique selling proposition or USP was born. "A USP is that distinct and appealing idea that sets you and your business, or practice, favorably apart from every other generic competitor." Jay Abraham

Your Client and their USP

Krakken VOMA research will identify your client's main competitors. Examining these competitors will reveal their unique selling proposition, aka USP, and their offers.

You will need to contrast these against your client's current marketing, clearly defining and possibly enhancing how your client is set apart from the pack.

Sounds simple enough. Grab some keywords that are specifically geared toward the USP, write some marketing copy and throw up a website, right?

Wrong. It's not enough to focus on keywords any more. Search engines are looking at the bigger picture, so in order to keep up, and keep your clients rankings and traffic up, you are going to have to look at the bigger picture too. You are going to have to understand how the keywords you are using fit into the corpus of documents called the internet.

Market Research vs. Keyword Research

Until recently most internet marketing research has consisted of keyword research, focusing simply on what keywords potential clients might be using to search for a product or service. However, with the migration from SEO to SEM it has become more important to understand how those keywords fit into the market view.

Market research in Krakken shows you the relationship between keywords and key market phrases, showing you the market segments that are both relevant and important for your client's USP. This gives you a birds eye view of the market, from which alternate vantage points become obvious, allowing you to map out a strategy by which all the appropriate segments of a market can be captured in your website and online marketing strategy.

Further, the keyword research aspect of creating a website is almost entirely automated by Krakken. All you have to do is select the appropriate market-defining terms as your silo themes. The Krakken blueprint process will automatically provide the supporting keywords and articles for each of your chosen silo themes. These keywords and articles are then presented for your approval, along with lists of potential keywords. In order to further refine the USP, it is possible to add any of the potential keywords to the auto-selected keywords, or substitute any of the potential keywords for any of the auto-selected keywords. This gives you full automation along with the power to manually enhance or override the automatic results.

Market Research and Competitive Analysis

Analyzing the competition for each segment of your target market plays an important role in discerning which market segments are appropriate for your client's USP, and how to prioritize the marketing campaign.

Krakken breaks this down in two different ways. The first, the Competitive Analysis Screen, shows you the top ranking competitors for each of the individual themes and across all themes relating to your USP. Further, it shows what those rankings are worth in terms of local currency, and how their total rankings across themes and markets tally and compare against each other and your client.

The second, our White Paper, shows you the strategies employed by these competitors to obtain their rankings. In detail, you'll see the inbound linking strategies utilized by each of the top competitors for their entire domain and the specific pages they have ranked, giving you a good indication of what has to be done to outrank them.

Search Engine Ranking, Inbound Links and Silo Structured Websites

Here then, is the obvious segue to talk about ranking your client's website and why silo structures are such a good thing, allowing you to rank for keywords with up to 90% fewer inbound links!

In our white paper "What the Heck IS a Silo" we go into detail about how a silo structure assists the search engine in understanding your site in general, and each page in particular. Firmly establishing the themes of the pages within your site reduces the need for inbound links to perform that task.

It is here that Krakken shines again by automating the laborious tedium of creating a properly themed, technically correct, semantically organized and thematically linked silo structured website and website blueprint.

PPC Silo Mapping

Pay Per Click Silo Mapping further rewards the owner of a silo structured website, by lowering the cost (improving the quality score) and increasing the conversions of pay-per-click campaigns whose destinations are landing pages on the silo structured website.

The market-defining terms that Krakken helps you select as the silo themes of your website can be called the "Keyword DNA" of your USP. By using these same Keyword DNA terms in your pay per click campaign, you'll have the best converting terms for both your pay per click campaign and your naturally ranking website. Matching the ads to the website will raise your quality score while at the same time increase your conversions by giving your potential customers exactly the information for which they were looking.

Analyzing Results - the Forgotten Stepchild of Marketing

Analysis is so important that we are actually dedicating an entire section of our website to all its facets. Without analysis, you have no idea if your marketing worked - whether you should repeat it or tweak it first. You don't know if you spent too much money or not enough - if the market segments you chose for your website and PPC campaign responded or not.

Analysis takes the soft science of marketing and turns it into transactional truths. Cold hard facts that contrast the amount of money it took to get a customer against the profit made by acquiring them.

If you want to compete in today's economy and stay in business, never mind swallowing entire markets, you are going to have to know the cold hard facts about your transactions.

Fortunately we are removing some of the challenge. We are developing modules for Krakken which will assist in this analysis by tracking your conversions by keywords, themes and market segments, reporting on the success of each. These modules are still in beta, but are anticipated to launch the second half of 2009.